ion's gun clinics produced the same result in Detroit (Hagar).Gun control advocates note only two burglars in 1,000 are driven off by armed homeowners. However, a huge majority of burglaries take place when no one is home, the statistical citation is deceptive. Several criminologists attribute the predominance of daytime burglary to burglars' fear of encountering an armed resident. Indeed, a burglar's chance of being sent to jail is about the same as his chance of being shot by a victim if the burglar breaks into an occupied residence (one to two percent in each case). Gun control is based on the faulty notion that ordinary American citizens are too hazardous and ill tempered to be trusted with weapons. Only through the slight alterations of specific constitutional rights is gun control even possible. It most severely victimizes those who most need weapons for self-defense. Many advocates of gun control believe that legislation in their favor will create a decrease in violent crime. To the contrary, Great Britain, a country with gun control, reports a frightening 1,200 percent increase of violent crimes against individuals in the last thirty-three years between 1960 and 1993. The number of robberies in this same time period has increased by 2,700 percent. Great Britain's overall crime rate has risen by 680 percent (Hagar). Gun control advocates, those who favor additional legal restrictions on the availability of guns or who want to outlaw certain types of guns, argue that the more guns there are the more crime there will be. There is no simple statistical relationship between gun ownership and homicide or other violent crimes. In the first 30 years of this century, U.S. per capita handgun ownership remained steady, but the homicide rate rose tenfold. Consequently, between 1937 and 1963, handgun ownership rose by 250 percent, but the homicide rate fell by 35.7 percent. Switzerland, through its militia system, issues both pistols...
